The Bike Room is pleased to present the closing, and performances, of Ground Up,the Infrastructure of Place. Turf, in substance and metaphor, is the organizing logic of works by six MFA candidates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, led by sculptor Jin Soo Kim. Scrutinized through various lenses – elemental, geographical and psychological – the project encompasses technological, kinetic, performative and material investigations.

“It has something to do with being in Chicago, in this crazy industrial/post-industrial city, working away in our catacombs of a basement,” says Andrew Barco. Like the adjoining studio cells that link their diverse practices, The Bike Room – a semi-subterranean vault (vernacularly dubbed garden apartment) is an apt container for the interactions of these artists,whose unifying premise extends the project’s locality from the lakefront and neighborhood grocery to the Northern Rockies of Wyoming, via the Chicago cattle trade.

The show’s purview examines human negotiations of natural and manmade moorings, as well as the physical and emotional ramifications that territory enacts upon us. The externalis manifest in the works of Kostoff, Peters and Barco, whose working materials are sand, shoreline and air, respectively. Lee, Suiter and Yoon draw our focus inward to inhabitable (and uninhabitable) spaces – to the mundane objects that, nonetheless, define us – to domestic detritus, both comfort and threat – and to rituals we create to attract and repulse confinement.